http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...858570-1997647

List Price: $13,314.74
Price: $7,989.99
You Save: $5,324.75 (40%)

For more than half a century Penguin has been the leading publisher of classics in the English-speaking world. Since the publication of the first Penguin Classic in 1946--E.V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey--Penguin's mission has been to make the great books of all time available at a reasonable cost. To this end, Penguin is dedicated to making sure that these books speak to contemporary readers by embracing excellence in scholarship, translation, and book design.


Now, for the first time, the entire line of Penguin Classics is available in one complete collection for home, office, or institutional libraries. For 2005, the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection consists of 1,082 titles, all great works of literature totaling nearly half a million pages. From Renaissance philosophy to the poetry of revolutionary Russia, from the spiritual writings of India to the travel narratives of the early American colonists, from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare to The Portable Sixties Reader, there are classics here to educate, provoke, entertain, and enlighten readers of all interests and inclinations.


From Edwin A. Abbott to Emile Zola, the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages--laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark. Approximately 700 pounds in weight, the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them atop each other--almost as tall as the Empire State Building.



anyone got $8000 spare?

Free shipping!

lol, I was just about to say that.

I bought a lottery ticket tonight, so I'll see - though it would be pretty boring to have the same binding, etc. for all those books. I'd definitely use the collection as a guide for many of the things I should get to have an extensive library.

Between my wife and I we probably already own almost half of them...

Reviewer: Victoria K. Baker "bibliomane" (Sahuarita, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This is an excellent set of books, and well worth owning. I'm saving for it, and I notice that shipping is free now, too. Thank you!

However, I am puzzled by some of the numbers in the other reviews, so let's take a look at just how big this set is. I'm an engineer, and I do this sort of thing all the time for a living. Let's assume that each book is a bit over 1" thick, just to make the math easier. 1,082 books would therefore be about 1200" wide (we're rounding up here, to be conservative). That's 100 feet, which is considerably smaller than the Empire State Building! My large Hon bookcases, which each have seven 3-foot shelves, hold 21 linear feet of books. In other words, five large bookcases would hold this collection (21 feet x 5 = 105 feet of books). Furthermore, let's do an error analysis and say that each book is much wider than 1"; let's try 2" instead. Now the stack is about 200' high (still nowhere near the height of a skyscraper), and you would need ten bookcases instead of five. I can't begin to imagine where some of the other analogies came from, but they are way off target. This is a large collection, but it isn't THAT big. Would someone from Amazon like to tell us just what the linear dimension of this collection is?

of course, if they wanted it to be a 'reasonable cost', why not just slap them all on a CDROM or two? even PDF format, could be printed if desired.

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That would make the books an average of 9.1 inches tall, which is a reasonable size. But it's a silly way to stack books.

"If the books were laid end to end, they would measure 828 feet, which is as long as a longish interstate overpass!"

"If the books were laid side by side to tile a football field, they would cover it from one sideline to the other and from the goal line to more than 1-1/4 yard!"

Is it possible to read that much . . . in a lifetime?

1,000 books....2 books a week = 104 books a year x 10 years = 1,040 books. Yeah, it's very easy. I've easily read 1,000 books in my lifetime, and i'm only 35....i'll probably read 2-3,000 more before I die (good lord willing I get the full allotment). I have a friend who runs a printing press and is able to read while jobs are running...he probably reads 3-5 books a week. that translates to 150-250 a year....

Don't forget that your A9 discount would save another ~$125.

Amazon will even take each book to your library/den and load up your bookshelves for you...

I believe you can find every one of these books for free on the internet. You can't get more reasonable than that.

[Egon]Print is dead.[/Egon]

If you tore out all the pages from all the books, and laid all the pages end to end, they would stretch 27 miles.

If you disintegrated all the books, and laid all the atoms end to end, they would stretch 20,000 light years.

thats a pretty good set of books...but a bit out of price range at the moment...my library card does fine for my book needs...odd i can't do the same with dvds...